Mr. Wilson's University

Woodrow Wilson saw Princeton’s value as a liberal-arts institution as preparing students not to be engineers or bankers but for lives of civic engagement.

By W. Barksdale Maynard

One drizzly weekend last month, a conference convened at
Princeton University to consider "The Educational Legacy of Woodrow
Wilson." Up front sat the organizers, the historian of higher
education James Axtell—an emeritus professor at the College of
William and Mary and visiting professor at Princeton—and the Wilson
biographer John Milton Cooper Jr., an emeritus professor at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. Both are distinguished
scholars. Cooper's mentor had been the